A PR person’s travel tips

With a CV filled with organising international car launches, attending European motor shows and managing global CSR programmes, I’ve walked miles in the cause of PR travel.  So why did I make such a basic mistake when packing to go to Bulgaria?

I confess, I only took high heeled shoes with me, not realising the city of Sofia has such appalling pavements, so my normal ability to totter without pain or problem was sorely tested (literally).

I’m sorry to say the cause of the cracked streets is too many cars, which are forced to park on the pavements - rendering them almost useless for pedestrians.

Professional public relations is a global affair

If you’ve missed me, I’ve been in Sofia, Bulgaria, teaching the CIPR Diploma qualification.  I was invited by Nelly Benova from Apeiron Communication - and I am really impressed with her commitment to improving the skills and professionalism of PR practitioners in this interesting part of southern Europe.

I had hoped to blog whilst there, but frankly, my schedule was packed with delivering seminars on the value of PR theory, systems perspective, stakeholder theory, ethical approaches to PR and so on.  Free time was spent enjoying Bulgarian food (great veggie choices), red wine and the great company of Nelly and the students.  I also had time to catch up with Aneta Stafanova who was a distance learner on the course with me last year, which was an added bonus.

Some very exciting things are going on in public relations in many countries - and it is useful to discuss and challenge the existing paradigms of the practice.  Unfortunately, there are many examples of press agentry in Bulgaria, but the opportunities to demonstrate excellent approaches are also there. 

As in the debate on gender in PR started by Richard Bailey, Bulgarian PR is female dominated - which has an impact on the value placed on the practice.  I’m familiar with feminist theories through the work of one of my 4th year undergraduates from Bournemouth University.  Unfortunately it seems that today PR is less respected despite - even because - it is dominated by young female graduates than when it was populated by unqualified men.  Such women are all too often seen as much less able than the likes of Max Clifford and Alistair Campbell - who lie and spin with such ease. 

PR is not alone in this - but in my view, little is done by the Universities and bodies such as CIPR, to show the breadth and depth of the profession which makes it a great career choice for both genders.

Not least, PR practitioners have never had so much potential to develop an international career, or to be taken seriously in organisations.  On my flight home yesterday, I chatted with a finance guy from Istanbul who regularly visited Sofia although he was based in London.  He told me that although he didn’t know a lot about PR, his company’s reputation was its most valuable asset - and he realised the need to invest in the best expert counsel in this regard that they could afford.  He recognised PR was a necessary expenditure in his accounts. 

If the suits in accounts realise this - then we should be ensuring more young guys considering career choices have public relations on their list of options. 

New PR test - refill a stapler?

Funniest television moment of the week came on last night’s Celebrity The Apprentice in aid of charity Comic Relief.  As the Prime Minister’s former ”spinmaster”, Alastair Campbell and ex-Daily Mirror editor, Piers Morgan attempted to take charge of the “boys’ team”, neither proved capable of refilling a stapler.

That surely confirms AC was never a real public relations practitioner - bet he never stuffed a press pack either.  Seemingly such work is the job of a PA - as he patronisingly described the former Apprentice winner, Tim Campbell.

Peugeot 207CC advert debuts on YouTube - but sells the 1930s classic 401 Eclipse to me

Apparently the new television advert for the Peugeot 207 CC debuts on UK television tonight - and of course, it’s already on YouTube. 

Personally, I’d swap the modern convenience of an electric roof for a car as beautiful as the 1930s Peugeot 401 Éclipse - which is undoubtedly the star of the new advert, and the model on which a retractable metal roof became popular. 

The stylish original cabriolet was a collaboration between Parisian densist and part-time aerodynamic design expert  Georges Paulin, the Peugeot concessionaire Darl’Mat and the Marcel Pourtout body construction firm.

Carrosserie Pourtout custom designed some of the most beautiful car bodies of the era for Bugatti, Voisin, Ballot, Minerva, Delage, Hispano- Suiza, Delahaye, Delaunay-Belleville, Talbot-Lago, Peugeot and Buick models belonging to the world’s rich and famous.

According to The New York Times (free registration), Paulin sold the retractable hardtop design and patent to Peugeot in 1935.  Raymond Milo, a Los Angeles dealer in collectible European cars and Éclipse owner is cited saying about 470 were built, and about 30 survive:

“The Éclipse was a milestone design and perhaps the most attractive example of Art Deco design applied to automobile coachwork,”

Paulin, a Jew, died in the Holocaust - and it wasn’t until the 206CC launch in 2001 that Peugeot reintroduced the retractable hardtop.  Today, there are many such models, including my own baby, a Mercedes SLK. 

And if I fancied trading the Merc in for a 1930s Peugeot Éclipse (if I could find one), it would set me back around $250,000.

Should PR students promote car crash game to children?

A few weeks ago, in conversation with a 4th year PR undergraduate, I heard that a trendy consultancy with a reputation for controversial practices had set an assignment for the students. 

Nothing unusual in applying studies to practice, but the idea was to come up with a creative approach to promote a new computer game, which has questionable ethics.  Its sole purpose was for the players - target market of young children - to crash whilst driving fast cars.  The more accidents they had, the more points they gained.

Given that ethics is a core part of the degree curriculum, I wondered what would be the outcome if a student submitted a report to their tutor justifying why they would turn down an invitation to pitch for such business. 

Indeed, I would fail anyone studying public relations who didn’t acknowledge the moral issues in such as assignment.

I mention this now as Autoblog reports a study by Peter Fischer at Ludwig-Maximilians University and the Allianz Center for Technology in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.  This claims a correlation between playing risk-taking road driving games with poor driving behaviour in real traffic conditions (amongst men but not women apparently).  Although I haven’t been able to track down the actual paper, it follows similar recent opinion research commissioned by BSM.

Whether or not there is any cause or effect, it doesn’t strike me as being very responsible to encourage very young children to “win” by crashing a car - nor for young PR students to be expected to come up with ideas for promoting such activities.

Brilliant mum and dad - and no degree

Does it really matter whether or not your parents have a degree? Or whether a young person has been in care?  These are the subject of two new questions added to the UCAS application entry for 2008.

The care question was approved in a format provided by the Frank Buttle Trust, a charity which is leading an initiative to support the progression of children in care to higher education.

Question format: Have you been in care? Yes or No response. (The question will be optional.)

UCAS has also been asked to add a question on whether the applicant’s parents have any experience of HE at the request of the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

Question format: Do any of your parents have any higher education qualifications such as a degree, diploma or certificate of higher education?  Yes, No, Don’t know response. (The question will be optional.)

[BTW: I expect it took a committee of University educated folk several meetings to agree that wording.]

My parents didn’t have University degrees - in fact, I don’t think any of my friends’ parents did.  Tony - my mum’s cousin - had been to University, and was considered a bit stuck up as a result (and he’d got a good job, married a posh girl and earned lots of money).

But everyone was keen for me to be educated - my mum taught me to read as a toddler and my dad helped with double A level maths homework - although I never have used a slide rule or trigonometric tables since. 

I don’t understand the value of knowing the educational achievements of our parents - to discriminate in favour of those whose parents don’t have degrees.  Of course, we should encourage a wide range of people to go to university, but does such information really indicate “who has the potential to succeed”.

For me going to University was a big deal - but I didn’t want any special favours in getting there.  And as I learned from playing cards and betting on horse-racing with my grandparents as a young child, I wouldn’t want to incur tens of thousands of pounds worth of debts either.

Brain Awareness Week gets me thinking

Did you know that we are half way through Brain Awareness Week?  According to Dana Alliance, the nonprofit organization of 260 leading neuroscientists (including ten Nobel laureates) behind the initiative - now in its 12th year, events are taking place in 69 countries.

It seems to have had little public relations support in the UK, but today, in Manchester (the only activity I could find), shoppers at Asda supermarket, have been learning about their little grey cells.  Helping people understand how the brain works and more about diseases such as  Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s sounds a really good idea. 

However, I also discover a piggy-back PR campaign:

“To celebrate National Brain Awareness Week, online games retailer
GAME.co.uk are going all intellectual and encouraging customers to give
their brain a thorough workout. From 12th – 18th March they will be
offering Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training for only £16.99, in addition to a
number of superb bundle offers!

Which got me thinking about whether it was appropriate to link computer games in this way - and I discovered something very interesting about Dr Kawashima, relating to my concerns yesterday about the credibility of academics.

In 2001, the Observer reported Kawashima, needing funds for his brain imaging research, decided to investigate the levels of brain activity in children playing video games hoping this would benefit game manufacturers.  He compared brain activity in children playing Nintendo games with those doing the Kraepelin test (adding single-digit numbers continuously for 30 minutes). 

BTW, Kraepelin discovered schizophrenia , manic-depression and jointly discovered Alzheimer’s disease with Dr. Alois Alzheimer.  

Kawashima’s findings showed the Nintendo group used parts of the brain associated with vision and movement, while the other children had activity throughout the left and right hemispheres of the frontal lobe - areas of the brain associated with learning, memory, emotion, and impulse control.   Back then, Kawashima said 

“There is a problem we will have with a new generation of children - who play computer games - that we have never seen before.  The implications are very serious for an increasingly violent society and these students will be doing more and more bad things if they are playing games and not doing other things like reading aloud or learning arithmetic.” 

He appeared certain that excessive playing of computer and video games would make children more prone to act more violently as they grow up.   Of course, the findings were criticised by the software industry and hey presto, in 2006, we get Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training

Designed by a prominent neuroscientist, Brain Training for Adults, a package of cerebral workouts aimed at the over-45s by the Japanese game console and software maker Nintendo, is said to improve mental agility and even slow the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease - said the  Observer.

How interesting.  Other scientists are sceptical of the games’s abilities - but clearly in the case of Nintendo and Kawashima, there has been a meeting of minds.

Bring back the honesty of elephant poo

Why do some people find it so hard to assess a situation and draw sound conclusions?  Apparently a member of the production team on children’s BBC programme, Blue Peter thought it acceptable to fake the winner of a competition where thousands of children had phoned-in to raise money for an appeal in aid of Unicef.

Situation: A technical failure meant callers couldn’t be linked to the studio and give the answer on air.  Conclusion: Get a child visiting the studio to phone in, give the answer and be awarded the prize

Has common sense been replaced by a first instinct to cover up and lie?  Didn’t anyone realise this was wrong? Not only to cheat, but to make a child complicit in the deception.  Apparently the incident was only revealed following a viewer email - queue the usual round of apologies, investigations and excuses for a ”serious error of judgement“.

Why didn’t anyone think to simply tell the truth?  Give viewers a bit of respect in understanding that things go wrong.  After all, this is the programme that showed us presenters slipping in elephant poo.

Should PR counsel against buying academic credibility?

Source credibility is a key component of public relations communications - with “expertise” identified as an important factor in studies of persuasive theory.  So it is not surprising that organisations seek the endorsement of academic authors.

But they should be mindful of any ethical considerations in doing so.  The Center for Media and Democracy reports concern over the funding and relationships between authors of a review of soft drinks and obesity in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (subscription).

This review challenged any links between soft drinks and obesity - but its credibility is questioned by the fact that it was funded by the American Beverage Association.  Other claims are that the authors have close links with the industry and their conclusions are always favorable to the beverage companies.

In fact, there is an inherent Catch 22 here - if the academics produce reports that favour the sponsoring organisation, they are accused of lacking objectivity and being too close to a particular industry.  If their work is critical, the funding organisation (whether this is  corporate or government) is unlikely to be too keen on the findings.

Given this question over credibility - perhaps public relations practitioners should counsel against the lose-lose situation of funding academic research.

Do babies really need an owner’s manual?

When did you learn to read, utter your first word, count to ten, do up your shoes or touch your nose?  Well apparently the government needs to know which is why it is enforcing a “national curriculum for children from birth to five.” 

There are echoes of Huxley’s Brave New World with parents under increased pressure to send their babies to childminders, who will then monitor:

children’s progress towards a set of 69 government-set “early learning goals”, recording them against more than 500 development milestones as they go.

Apparently, their “early years profile” score at the age of five will be recorded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES).  What will happen to the wee ones who are behind on their giggling grades isn’t clear - maybe we’ll have a tickle tsar.

In public relations, we increasingly recognise that people are individuals, not as some simplified mass.  This is something I believe applies particular to learning.  But the government believes all children are identical and should be forced through a structured sausage machine of education.

Maybe we should survey all politicians to find out when they first recited “Humpty Dumpty”, took their first steps, dressed themselves, or discovered how to do a quiet fart!  Does it really make a difference to later progress?

Of course we need to help children with learning difficulties, but the majority of babies develop at their own pace and aquire all the basic skills in the end.  It is 25 years since I studied child psychology as part of my degree - but even then Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development were seen as approximate and not rigid.

Do we really need the DfES to “reassure parents that their child’s development is being supported, no matter what form of childcare or pre-school education they use”? 

I appreciate many parents aren’t familiar with babies before having their own, but wouldn’t simple guidance enabling them to feel confident about gradual development be better than increasing paranoia about their babies’ ranking in kiddi-school?

Clearly the government believes babies should come with an owners’ manual - so they’re developing a  “92-page set of practice guidance featuring 513 skills and attitudes children should acquire” will ensure nursery staff adopt a “rigorous approach”.  Don’t they know that Haynes has already beaten them to it?